You'd be hard-pressed to think up good reasons to buy an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition unless you have a lot of money to burn, but if this article from Maximum PC is correct then you now have a couple of reasons fewer to buy one of these CPUs over a Core i7 920 or 940, as they claim that all retail Core i7 parts should have an unlocked QPI (quick Path Interconnect) speed option as well as an unlocked memory multiplier.
Quote:
After talking with Intel as well as some back channel contacts we had, we learned that the memory multipliers on production CPUs are unlocked. The reason our CPUs had locked multipliers, we were told by Intel, was because they are engineering sample chips. Engineering sample parts are pre-production CPUs provided to the media, OEMs, motherboard makers and various other hardware vendors to test and bring up components. These CPUs, we were told, are locked.
Huh? To make matters worse, while mucking with our retail Core i7-920, we discovered that our QPI speeds were also unlocked. We could set it to 6.4GT/s all day. Our back channel contact tells us that after some digging, it was discovered that yes, that’s the way it's supposed to be. QPI is supposed to be 4.8GT/s but you can run at it 6.4GT if you want. Wha, what? But two months ago, Intel insisted that QPI was locked. Now we're told that QPI is unlocked. Confused? We are.
You can read the full story
here, but if you've had any joy in finding that these settings are unlocked on Core i7 920 and 940 parts then please let us know in our forum.
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